Letter from Moscow.

Cossacks Back--and Beggars Too

November 08, 1996|By With the passing of the Bolsheviks, the Russian capital has embraced some czarist ways and Western styles, observes the Tribune's Michael McGuire. and Michael McGuire was Moscow bureau chief for the Tribune in the early 1970s.

Moscow — As midnight encounters go, my rendezvous with a Russian beneath a street lamp might have ended, once upon a time, with a trip through the great gate at Lefortovo prison.

That's because the KGB had a problem with envelopes changing hands between a foreign correspondent and a Soviet citizen after dark on a deserted street.

But my recent midnight meeting was brief and uneventful. The manila envelope, containing innocent cuttings from American fashion magazines, was handed over, dosvidanyas were mumbled in farewell, and I continued on my way without a secret agent in sight or mind.

It wasn't always so easy to deal with either envelopes or Russians before the Soviet Union came to an end late in 1991. Nicholas Daniloff, then a reporter for U.S. News and World Report, discovered in the mid-80s just how tough it could be when he ended up in Lefortovo after driving to the Lenin Hills.

Daniloff had gone to the site overlooking central Moscow to say farewell to a Soviet acquaintance on the eve of the American's transfer to Washington. The friend handed him an envelope, later said to contain secret maps and photographs, and within seconds the KGB pounced.

It had been a classic Soviet frame-up. After a few days of interrogation in Lefortovo, Daniloff was exchanged for a newly arrested Soviet spy and returned to the United States.

That was a time when Moscow was the epitome of Soviet gloom and grime. U.S. correspondents lived and worked in bugged homes and offices and spoke into tapped telephones. Drab KGB Volgas often appeared in rear-view mirrors, and you either shook off the secret police before visiting Soviet friends and news sources or scrubbed the meeting.

Today, the successors of the KGB no longer keep foreign correspondents under surveillance, and much of the old intrigue of reporting from Moscow has spiraled down the drain of history. But that's only part of the changes wrought by events that brought an abrupt end to one of history's greatest empires.

Once strictly off-limits to reporters, the sons and daughters of the old ruling Politburo and Communist Party Central Committee are as approachable these days as street vendors selling formerly sacred party banners and other memorabilia of the old system.

Giant paintings of St. George, now considered Russia's patron saint, and his white horse have replaced icons of Lenin, Marx and Engels on the sides of buildings overlooking the city's main thoroughfares.

On streets where Soviet officials with red banners once battled to control hearts and minds, today's war flags are store signs and billboards bearing names like Camel, Lucky Strike and Marlboro. Coca Cola and bread appear side by side on posters as staples of new Russian life.

"Why don't you just make us your 51st state and get it over with?" asked an office worker, her voice drenched with sarcasm. "We're used to being ruled by outsiders, you know."

True enough: The czars were mixed with foreign blood, early Russians once talked to the Swedes about providing foreign rule, Russians have been ruled by Kiev, Catherine the Great was the daughter of a Lithuanian peasant, Stalin was a Georgian, and Khrushchev a Ukrainian.

Although many changes represent an abrupt departure from the Soviet years, others seem a throwback to the way things were before the Bolsheviks came to power almost 80 years ago.

Beggars, the homeless and bread lines common under the czars have returned to Russian streets. Drunks lie passed out for hours on hotel lawns and park land while police in passing squad cars look the other way.

Churches demolished or damaged by the Communists are being rebuilt and restored to their former glory.

Ranking army generals with florid faces again kneel before the Russian Patriarch in the Kremlin's Cathedral of the Archangel, accepting his blessing on behalf of the nation's army.

Cossacks, some wearing their trademark tall sheepskin hats, guard the grounds of monasteries, as they did before the fall of the last czar in 1917.

Real fashion, and not the designs of wishful thinking, has returned to the windows of the giant GUM department store.

And Muscovites remain every bit as rude to one another as they were said to have been under Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great or the deposed Nicholas II. They may be even ruder, considering that they now drive the vastly multiplying automobiles on the city's streets.

"I had heard that these drivers are horridly rude, but that hasn't been my experience," a newly-arrived Westerner told a Moscow friend, referring to the decent way Moscow drivers yielded to him at intersections or waved him with courtesy into crammed lanes in rush-hour.

His impression was altered upon being told that his dark-colored 4x4 was the preferred transportation of Moscow's ruthless mafia.